Best timeline

Being born in the early 70s suburbia was the best. Although many of the sicknesses that will most likely prove terminal to America (and certainly to America as we knew it) had already set in, they had not yet metastasized, so we didn't really know it. I got to grow up during the 80s, a kind of last gasp of our culture from when it was confident in who it was and its place in the world, and honestly--we didn't worry too much about "the world" anyway.

I mean, sure--the BEST timeline would have been something like the 80s, but one in which the Yankees didn't win their mean-spirited and hateful war of conquest against the rest of the country in the 1860s, so we really had America in the 1980s, not the Yankee parody of America that most of the twentieth century ended up being. But that said, the 80s that we did get was pretty special most of the time, and it carried forward for a time into the 90s. 

This is especially true for fans of fantasy, of course. While fantasy has its roots in the very earliest myths of Western civilizations foundational pillars--from what we know now, going back into the Neolithic at least, and the spread of the Corded Ware culture and it's various "children" which gives us our various pre-Christian pagan mythologies of gods and monsters, the reality of course is that fantasy is also a thoroughly modern genre. J. R. R. Tolkien and even E. R. Eddison and William Morris may well have been trying to channel aspects of this early era in our history, but they did so by writing thoroughly modern novels, incorporating in many respects thoroughly modern ideas and perspectives. Much has been made of how Tolkien's experience in the Great War colored his views of Middle-earth as it developed for example. The reality is that all art and literature is a product of the time in which it is made, no matter how much it may attempt to "call back" to earlier times and places. In fact, the very desire to call back to a more fantastic, simpler time of clear-cut heroes, feminine damsels in distress and exciting, colorful adventure in the way that fantasy does is itself a product of the times in which it was written.

Of course, Morris, Eddison and even Tolkien were "old news" by the 80s, and by then fantasy had been even more thoroughly modernized, in particular by the grand pastiche nature of Dungeons & Dragons, which created something which has sometimes disparagingly been called "extruded fantasy product." This was "dumbed down" even more at the actual tables of most people who played, who often churned out nearly plotless hack and slash as the distillation of what had been a proud and grand literary tradition when it started. But that's fine; in fact--it was kinda cool in most respects.

Personally, I always felt that hack and slash was better suited to a different medium than face to face tabletop roleplaying games, because using those for hack and slash was not only kind of boring, but also squandered the potential of face to face gaming anyway. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought so, as hack and slash D&D-like video games reached a peak in the years immediately after the 80s. Some will say that the Diablo games of the late 90s were the ultimate expression of this, and it's hard to argue that. But we had pretty good stuff in the 80s and 90s already. 1985's arcade game Gauntlet was already exploring what hack and slash D&D could look like in a visual medium, which was honestly probably more in line with what hack and slash is suited for anyway. But for my money, it wasn't until the beat em up genre appeared that a really good type of hack and slash that wasn't so gonzo that it was a parody of the concept really appeared. The first of these was Sega's 1989 Golden Axe which later morphed into a series that has, depending on how you counted them, between three and eight entries. Capcom got into the action with King of Dragons in 1991, but probably produced the best D&D inspired hack and slash beat em ups when they made the two D&D licensed games: Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. 

The entire beat em up genre went underground shortly after these games came out, until their modern resurgence as people tire of "modern" consumer dreck and have found that indie developers digging into the 80s and 90s can actually provide a much better experience than many (if not most) modern struggle sessions masquerading as entertainment. 

It may seem odd that Japanese developers created these classics of Western fantasy, but keep in mind that during the 80s "cultural appropriation" wasn't a dirty word; in fact, if someone liked aspects of our culture enough to copy it and provide us something back in return based on it, we considered that flattering rather than insulting, as normal healthy people should. Of course, with the case of Golden Axe, it was developed by a guy who loved the Conan the Barbarian movie; in the case of the D&D license, it was developed as it was because of the protectionism of TSR of their brand, and their insistence that someone who knew the territory oversee some aspects of the development to make sure that what came back would be recognizably D&D to American audiences, and not some weird Japanification of it. Not that that would have been terrible necessarily; keep in mind that during the 80s and 90s in particular we were at peak Japanophilia in America. Icons of Japanese culture like samurai and ninjas were ubiquitous in American pop culture by this point, and Americans were taking karate and judo classes at probably their highest rates. The myth of ancient Asian wisdom was flying pretty high at this point, and Americans thought even fortune cookies offered a profound exegesis on life. A Japanified D&D wouldn't have necessarily been bad. But getting very recognizably western D&D was obviously, I think, much better. And this is the kind of environment where hack and slash can thrive, in my opinion, much better than an actual tabletop experience, which just begs for more because the environment allows for it so easily.

Most of these games are available relatively cheaply as part of some collection or other; the D&D games are available together as a bundle on Steam, the Beat em Up bundle by Capcom also has King of Dragons as well as several other classics of the genre (including Final Fight, arguably one of the best examples of it ever made) and I believe that there are Golden Axe compilations as well. In fact, I believe that until recently you could get Golden Axe on iOS even.

If you search Tower of Doom longplay on Youtube, you'll get loads of examples of someone playing the full game all the way through. Edited and with continues and whatnot, most of these take about an hour to watch; it probably would take you or I a little bit longer than that to play through ourselves. But it's worth checking out. Shadow over Mystara is a better game in almost every respect, but I don't believe you should do that one without doing Tower of Doom first.

And I do recommend picking up Chronicles of Mystara on Steam. It has both games, edited and tweaked slightly from the arcade originals to be better suited to todays audience and hardware and playing experience (I doubt most people are actually inserting quarters into their computers, for example.) It's only $15. At that price, it's about the same as getting a new streaming movie from Disney+ or Amazon Prime, and yet offers a better experience that most of what those guys are offering. And if you can get online with a few buddies and play it cooperatively, the way it was originally intended, holy cow, now you're talking fun. Plus because of the choices, there's some replayability. You get totally different levels with your choices. Here's one example. Look up more; I don't know that this is the best one. It's the best advertisement if you still don't believe you should buy your own copy and play it yourself.

(In fact, actually the guy playing this isn't very good. Chances are you would do at least as well picking it up cold with no experience. Which makes it even more interesting as a possible sales tool, I guess.)